Comment by neutronicus

7 hours ago

C++ seems alive and well in the defense space. The big contractors near me have tons of C++ job postings and I don't think I've seen a single one looking for Rust.

5 comments

neutronicus

tormeh 3 hours ago

The new drone companies seem to favor Rust more. Helsing sponsors a lot of Rust conferences and stuff. Quantum Systems has job postings for embedded Rust. For companies that don't have a lot of legacy influencing their decisions, Rust is pretty much always going to be in their software stack. The big primes will probably come around to it in a decade or so.

thomashabets2 7 hours ago

Do you know if the code bases are of the kind where dynamic memory (among many other features) is disallowed?

3eb7988a1663 3 hours ago

Defense industry can work around that.

  This sparked an interesting memory for me.  I was once working with a customer who was producing on-board software for a missile.  In my analysis of the code, I pointed out that they had a number of problems with storage leaks.  Imagine my surprise when the customers chief software engineer said "Of course it leaks".  He went on to point out that they had calculated the amount of memory the application would leak in the total possible flight time for the missile and then doubled that number.  They added this much additional memory to the hardware to "support" the leaks.  Since the missile will explode when it hits its target or at the end of its flight, the ultimate in garbage collection is performed without programmer intervention.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180228-00/?p=98...

neutronicus 7 hours ago

Some of them, probably.
From the job postings, many of them seem to be physics simulations of various kinds where (in my experience) memory is allocated on the heap without a second thought. Well, there are second thoughts, but those second thoughts are about performance.

debo_ 3 hours ago

C++ requires defensive programming, so I guess it fits that defense requires C++ programming.